]]>Hard to believe, but we’re already gearing up for the 2011 Crunchies. Once again, GigaOM is co-hosting the annual event, which celebrates innovation and new technology, with our colleagues over at TechCrunch and VentureBeat.

The award ceremony and after-party will be held Tuesday, January 31, 2012, at a new venue — Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. We’ll have twice the capacity of previous shows. As usual, tickets will be released in batches, starting in early December.

]]>One of the many traditions of Apple’s WWDC is the presentation of Apple Design Awards (ADA) for “excellence in iOS and Mac OS X app design and development.” It’s a matter of pride to be awarded with the simple silver cube, and also nice to receive the accompanying awards of a MacBook Air, iPad 2, and iPod touch. Apple has three primary criteria for the selection of winners:

Innovation. Innovative apps are revolutionary, inspirational, unique, and do things in completely new and exciting ways.

Technical excellence. Technically advanced apps have excellent performance and make extensive use of the latest Apple technologies to deliver innovative, platform differentiating, and advanced features.

The winners are chosen for Student, iPhone, iPad, and Mac categories from apps available for sale in the iTunes App Store and the Mac App Store (app links below are to the respective App Store). The 2011 ADA winners are:

]]>U.K. magazine T3 gave out its Gadget Awards last night, annual prizes that are awarded to the best and brightest in consumer electronics. The awards showed that the buying public’s love of Apple products in general, and the iPad specifically, is an international affair.

The iPad was singled out for the top honor of Gadget of the Year at the awards ceremony, which took place in London. Awards are decided based on a combination of reader votes (some 750,000) and the opinions of a panel of expert judges.

In addition to Gadget of the Year, the iPad also took home the Innovation of the Year award, beating out such competitors as the Toshiba Cell TV and Microsoft’s Kinect motion capture controller for the Xbox. It’s certainly put up the numbers to merit such an honor.

Apple also took home awards for Commuter Gadget of the Year (iPhone 4), Retailer of the Year (Apple) and Computer of the Year (MacBook Pro). But it’s worth noting that in many of the categories it didn’t win, it lost out to Android or Android devices.

Google Maps Navigation for Android took the award for App of the Year, once a category that Apple owned virtually uncontested. Phone of the Year went to the HTC Desire, an Android-based smartphone. HTC also won Brand of the Year beating out Apple, which apparently came off as too smug in the minds of both judges and T3’s readership.

All signs point to the fact that Apple now has to share a podium it once held uncontested. Once upon a time, the term “iPhone-killer” signified a mythical device that no real shipping smartphone could ever live up to. It’s taken three years, but as awards like these show, the field is opening up once again.

]]>Swapping turtleneck for tuxedo, Steve Jobs made a rare public appearance when he took to the red carpet at the Academy Awards last night, spotted first by eagle-eyed social media maven Wayne Sutton who posted to his blog; OMG it’s Steve Jobs! I’m the only one yelling at him! #oscars #kodakredcarpet

Sutton doesn’t mention whether his yells went unnoticed by His Steveness, but he posted a fantastic snapshot of the event to his blog — take a look and see if you can spot El Jobso for yourself (it’s not immediately easy to find him in the crowd, but once you see him, he’s hard to miss!)

Image courtesy of Wayne Sutton

The Theme Begins (Prequel to The Oscar Theme)

Now why would the normally shy and retiring Steve Jobs be at the Academy Awards Oscar ceremony? Well, he is the largest individual shareholder in the Walt Disney Company, to whom he sold Pixar Animation Studios in 2006. Pixar is the legendary computer animation studio responsible for the box office hits Toy Story and Finding Nemo (to name only two of many others) and its latest CG offering, Up, was nominated for an impressive five Academy Awards (and was the first Pixar film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture).

On the night, Up received two of those Oscars; Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score. Steve didn’t take to the stage to receive the awards, but I’m sure he was grinning from ear to ear like a proud father at his child’s first music recital.

The Oscar Theme

If you’re interested in the mechanics of modern movie making, you’ll find this fascinating; Macworld UK reports that a staggering nine out of ten of the Oscar-nominated Documentaries (across both the Short and Feature Documentary categories) were edited on Macs using Final Cut Pro.

If you’re not a movie maker, you might not know that Final Cut Pro is Apple’s pro-level film editing software. Speaking from personal experience of many hours spent in many darkened editing suites all around the world, there are (broadly speaking) three dominant software editing tools; Avid, Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro. (There are others, of course, but they’re far less commonly used in the film and TV industry.)

Avid has traditionally been the editing platform of choice and still reigns supreme, though mostly because it has been around since the Stone Age and many long-established editing facilities using Avid suites have long-term service contracts tying them to that platform. But Final Cut Pro (and the Final Cut Studio suite of film making tools) has been gaining ground in recent years, due in part to its relative affordability and Apple’s amazingly progressive efforts to develop and promote new HD codecs and standards, such as the ProRes family. (For more on this, you can watch a video on Apple’s Final Cut product pages.)

That almost all the Award-nominated Short and Feature Documentaries were edited using Final Cut (and, therefore, made on Macs) speaks volumes about filmmakers’ faith in, and trust for, Apple’s technologies.

The Oscar Theme Part 2: The Theme Continues

The impressive numbers continue. I almost missed this one, but last week The Awl’s Abe Sauer penned Why Apple Deserves and Oscar Too, which started with this remarkable tidbit;

In the 44 films in 2009 that topped the box office for at least one weekend, an Apple logo or device could be seen in at least 18 of them. (That’s almost 41%.) In some, Apple products even eclipsed their human scene partners. This high appearance rate does not include the heap of mass-market films from 2009 that did not own a weekend but also featured Apple product placement.

Sauer has done his homework. He goes on to list a fair number of those movies (you can read the list for yourself here) and, if you’ve got the time to spare, (7 minutes and 25 seconds, to be precise) there’s even a Ken Burns-tastic video slideshow of screenshots from movies and TV shows through the years featuring Apple products. Sauer adds;

…Brandcameo shows that Apple has appeared in 102 of the 302 weekly number one U.S. box office films from 2001 to 2009—more than 33% of them. Apple’s number is actually higher when period and fantasy/scifi films, in which Apple could not appear, are removed (the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars prequels 3:10 to Yuma, etc.).

Right then, don’t let it be said that Apple’s brand managers aren’t doing good work.

The Oscar Theme Part 3: Oscar’s Revenge

During the ad break (presumably while Oscar winners were busy phoning their Moms with the good news) the first ever iPad television commercial was broadcast. The ad itself is a bit “meh,” to be honest; it didn’t light the world on fire and teach us anything we didn’t already know. But that’s OK, because what really matters, I suppose, is that a very large audience not normally exposed to tech/gadget news saw the iPad for the first time. You can watch the ad on Apple’s website here.

I’m still wondering what Apple was up to in that diner back in August last year. At this rate, I think we’ll have to wait for next year’s Oscars to find out.

Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian demonstrator who was shot and killed during a protest in Tehran last year, became a symbol of the Iranian resistance not long after the shocking video of her death began appearing on YouTube and other video sharing sites. According to the NY Times, the video was originally sent to Voice of America, The Guardian newspaper and five others in Europe, asking those who received it to pass it along. It was an Iranian expatriate in the Netherlands who first posted the video to Facebook, which started its online distribution.

The Polk Awards recognized the video producers despite the anonymous nature in which it was created and distributed. “This video footage was seen by millions and became an iconic image of the Iranian resistance. We don’t know who took it or who uploaded it, but we do know it has news value,” award curator John Darnton said in a statement.

The Polk Awards were established in 1948 to honor CBS reporter George W. Polk, who died while covering the Greek civil war. The awards are given out by Long Island University and are considered one of the top honors for journalism in the U.S.

]]>The second batch of tickets for the third annual Crunchies awards ceremony — scheduled to be held on Jan. 8 at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco — goes on sale today, here, starting at noon PST. You can also still vote for the tech people, products and companies that are finalists.

We will once again be co-hosting the Crunchies awards, with VentureBeat and TechCrunch. The awards ceremony, which will kick off at 7:30 p.m. on the 8th, will be followed by an after-party at San Francisco’s City Hall’s Grand Rotunda.

You can vote for your favorite finalists from each of this year’s 18 award categories here. You can also find the rules here. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote once per day, per award category, through Wed., Jan. 6 at midnight PST. Orchestra seats are sold out at this point, and and balcony tickets are $45, so get your tickets now if you want to attend the ceremony.

]]>The first batch of 150 tickets for the third annual Crunchies awards ceremony — scheduled to be held on Jan. 8, 2010, at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco — go on sale today starting at noon PST. As we reported yesterday, you can also now vote for your favorite tech finalists.

We will once again be co-hosting the Crunchies awards, which honor the best tech companies and entrepreneurs, with VentureBeat and TechCrunch. The awards ceremony, which will kick off at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 8th, will be followed by an after-party at San Francisco’s City Hall’s Grand Rotunda.

The Crunchies Committee will select five finalists from each of the 18 award categories. You can now vote for your favorite entrepreneurs, startups and tech accomplishments among the Crunchies finalists here. You can also find the rules here. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote once per day, per award category, through Wed., Jan. 6th at midnight PST. Orchestra seats are $75 and balcony tickets are $45. A total of 450 tickets will be released to the public.

The awards ceremony, on Friday, Jan. 8th at 7:30 pm, will be followed by an after-party at San Francisco’s City Hall’s Grand Rotunda. The Crunchies Committee will select five finalists for each of the 18 award categories. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote once per day, per award category, through Wed., January 6th at midnight PST. There are 18 award categories to recognize accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, at noon PST, the first batch of 150 tickets will become available at the Crunchies site. Orchestra seats are $75 and balcony tickets are $45, with both types of tickets good for the after-party. Only 450 tickets are being released to the public, so buy early if you want to attend the ceremony.

You know how Michael Jackson won so many awards in his lifetime that they had to start inventing new ones to justify dragging him onstage? Entertainer of the Universe and Best Selling Artist in the New Galactic Empire spring to mind. Hey, that’s the price of über-success.

Apple’s getting a taste of that very same medicine now, as it is named recipient of a boatload of “Best…” titles in AdweekMedia’s “Best of the 2000s” Awards. Described by AdweekMedia as “Our picks, and yours, for the decade’s best in the marketing, media and agency world” the awards include yawn-inducing categories such as “Agency executives of the Decade” and “Small Agency of the Decade” but thankfully all the best stuff is hugely more accessible — and interesting — to non-marketing-types (which, thankfully, describes most of us).

Steve Jobs and the iPod reinvented the music business. Sergey Brin and Larry Page tamed the Web. Ad shop Goodby, Silverstein & Partners rewrote the creativity book. And this thing called social media put amateurs in charge of just about everything else.

They definitely start as they mean to go on, since Apple, its products, campaigns and personalities bag a good number of the awards. AdweekMedia say they spent a month working out a list of “…the best and brightest in the branding, marketing, media and agency world in 33 categories over the past 10 years.” I’m glad to see they’re mindful of the criticisms leveled at industry awards that never seek the opinions of the actual, product-buying public; “As a reality check, we sought your input here on this site over the past month.” They add, “Those results are presented here, next to our selections. Much of the time, we agree. Other times it’s not even close.”

Here’s the breakdown of the awards (images from the AdweekMedia awards website).

Good old Steve. Last month Fortune named him CEO of the Decade, and he’s a finalist for TIME’s Person of the Year 2009. Another award can’t hurt, right? Here’s a brief excerpt from AdWeekMedia’s positively glowing review of El Jobso:

Visionary, iconoclastic and fearless, Steve Jobs the marketer is inseparable from Steve Jobs the personality. His inimitable blend of competitive skill and design savvy hasn’t just saved a fading brand, it’s recast two businesses that used to have nothing to do with computers: music and mobile phones. Over the past decade, Apple’s iPod and iPhone have redefined popular culture, and returned the company to its roots in innovation and just-plain coolness.

You’d have thought Andy Warhol did them—and why not? In the end, the work was nearly as iconic. The treatment […] achieved what in branding is the nearly impossible: defining a product without showing what it even looked like up close.

Though the brand almost petered out in the ’90s, last year consumers told Interbrand that Apple was the thing they couldn’t live without and the one they found most inspiring.

There wasn’t always consensus between AdweekMedia’s nominations and the opinions of their readers. The Marketing Innovation of the Decade award was won by “Viral Videos” while their Reader’s Choice had it go to Apple for “iPhone Apps.” The Reader’s Choice award for Digital Device/Platform of the Decade was the iPhone, while AdweekMedia preferred to give it to Facebook, instead.

In a nice twist where, again, readers didn’t agree with AdWeekMedia’s choice, at least they were in disagreement over which Apple product to laud; both the iPod and the iPhone won Product of the Decade, depending on your point of view. And while the readers voted Steve Jobs Media Executive of the Decade, it went instead to Rupert “Google is Stealing My Stuff” Murdoch. Other big names receiving awards include Google, television show The Sopranos, the Disney Channel and WIRED magazine.

Despite the disagreements (there are many more instances in which Apple and Apple products feature prominently in the reader’s votes, check out the awards website to view the numbers) it’s still inspiring to see Apple take so many of the top awards. Of particular note is the Brand of the Decade award; coming from a company of professional advertisers and marketers, it’s obvious how much respect and admiration the world of marketing has for Mr Jobs’ company. Remarkable, too, given how much trouble that company was in last decade.

I recommend taking the time to view the awards website and read the full descriptions for each winner; you’ll get an insight into a world we otherwise try very hard to avoid (after all, who likes Marketing?) but be warned — it’s often a polarizing experience! And when you’re done, come back and tell us whether you agree with the choice in winners.

Where will you be this June? If you’re an Apple developer, you’ll want to be at San Francisco’s Moscone West for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2009 slated for June 8-12.

This is the premier event for Apple developers who create apps for Mac OS X or iPhone, and also for IT pros who work with Apple platforms. Besides rubbing elbows with developers of every level of experience, attendees can hit up technical sessions on Mac development, participate in hands-on labs, check out presentations by special guest speakers, and get in on workshops to help you design and create iPhone Apps.

Tickets to this extremely popular event usually sell out quickly, so if you plan to go, reserve your spot now. Tickets will set you back $1,595, but if you snag yours before April 24, Apple will knock off $300. ADC student members and Team Members in the iPhone Developer University Program can apply for one of 400 scholarships available through Apple.